Florida keys Training
Our family left with another friend on March 10 and drove to the Florida Keys for some swimming! I needed time in salt water and lots of it. I am not sure how to adequately describe our trip. It was quite honestly, the most incredible place I’ve ever been to. We spent 4-6 hours every day swimming.
In the morning we would swim for 2 hours, before it got warm out, on the gulf side of the islands and then in the afternoon we would take out our boat and visit a variety of different reefs in the Atlantic ocean, It was AMAZING!!.
My favorite part of my morning swims were the stingrays that swam underneath me and instead of a black line on the bottom of a pool with a wall, there was a beautiful mound of rocks with all kinds of tropical fish swimming around them when I reached the end of my lap. It was awesome. One morning my mom had a manatee swim past her!
We spent a day at John Pennecamp Coral Reef State Park and went over 30 km into the ocean to find all kinds of amazing treasures. My mom is an awesome navigator! We had a blast. On this day we visited 5 major dive sites. At the furthest reef out my mom could hear dolphins under the water, but she couldn’t hear them. We were 2 minutes out of the water and then they appeared. It was really neat and amazing. Mom put her scuba stuff on and hopped right back in! She was hilarious with her snorkel gear on while driving the zodiac, ready to hop in and ‘swim’ with the dolphins.
We started in Key Largo and then made our way up to Key West, hitting every reef we could along the way. Looe Key was my mom and sister’s favorite spot. There were a ton of sharks swimming around the reef. It was really intimidating. We swam well over 4 km of reef on this day. Just amazing. There was a HUGE barracuda under our boat when we got back to it and mom let us get in first when we returned. A little intimidating to say the least!
My sister, mom and I enjoyed some wonderful time away together with our friend, Krista Ten Brinke. It was a wonderful 2 weeks that we actually never wanted to leave.
